


Horizon's Ghost

by hes_per_ides



Series: Indrani Shepard [2]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, mostly written to get one joke out of my system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 18:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20999177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hes_per_ides/pseuds/hes_per_ides
Summary: (ME2, right after Priority: Horizon)Shepard didn’t deal well with failure. Turned out she wasn’t great with disappointment either. After getting her heart bruised on Horizon, Rani Shepard talks with Garrus about all she'd hoped that meeting could have been and how much she misses her old crew.





	Horizon's Ghost

Horizon had been a nightmare. 

Oh, Mordin’s upgrades had protected them from the swarm, just as he’d said they would. They’d taken down everything the Collectors could throw at them and driven them away with their harvest incomplete. But ultimately they’d been too late for most of the colony, and that counted as mission failure in Shepard’s eyes. 

Shepard did not deal well with failure.

And then there was seeing Kaidan again… nothing could have prepared her for that. He’d always been in a corner of her mind, ever since she awoke. She’d quietly imagined countless scenes of their reunion: Part of her kept an eye out for him every time they went to the Citadel, hoping happenstance would see them brought together. They’d laugh, they’d kiss, they’d cry, and they'd pick up right where they'd left off, as if it had been nothing but a few weeks apart. It was soppy and ridiculous, and all that was missing was the swelling soundtrack.

None of her idle imaginings had included the sweat, the blood, the stink of eezo, or the look of confusion that had turned to utter wounded betrayal when they finally stood face-to-face. She hadn’t imagined the clipped accusative tone of his voice, the hardness in what had always been such soft warm eyes. She hadn’t imagined how much it would hurt. They couldn’t have left the colony quickly enough after that and she’d refused to meet anyone’s eyes in the shuttle, lest they see how hard she was struggling to build a dam against her welling emotions.

Turned out Shepard didn’t deal particularly well with disappointment either. 

She’d been fending off call-me-Kelly ever since they’d returned to the ship. No, she didn’t want to talk about the mission; no, not about seeing Kaidan either; no,_ definitely_ not about her attitude to failure; _NO_. She did not want the interfering naive busybody taking notes and reporting back any more than she already did. What she wanted was to take a hot shower, cry for about an hour, eat dinner, go to bed, and maybe cry some more. Maybe hit something, should a target present itself.

She’d managed step one of that plan. Hot water had washed away the dirt and sweat of the mission and eased her tense muscles, but not her mood. She’d dried off and wrapped up in her dressing gown–warm and soft and totally devoid of Cerberus emblems, courtesy of their last trip to the Citadel–and was squeezing the moisture out of her hair when someone tapped at the door.

“I told you it’s none of your fucking business, Chambers!” Rani snapped.

“Shepard, it’s me.” Garrus’s drawl was unmistakable even through the bulkhead. She paused in towelling her hair for a moment but then went on with renewed intensity, resolutely ignoring him.

A minute later: “Still here, Shepard.”

Rani let out an exasperated sigh. She went to the door and glared at the interface for a moment, then opened it to transfer the glare to the persistent turian on the other side.

“Not now, Vakarian. It’s been a long day.”

“I know. I thought you might want to talk about it.”

“Nothing to talk about,” she said, with a shrug that wasn’t convincing anyone.

Garrus slipped past her and sauntered into the cabin while she made ineffectual protesting noises. He noted the photo frame face down on her desk. Though it was his first time in her cabin it didn’t take any great leap of deductive reasoning to guess whose face had been slammed into the desktop. He picked up the frame, which lit up at the contact, and found exactly the portrait he’d expected on the other side.

“You know,” he began casually. “I went to your memorial. Nice ceremony, if a little pompous. Everyone was very complimentary, especially the people who’d never met you. No-one who had could have said such nice things, not with a straight face.” Shepard couldn’t help but smile a little at that, despite her determination to stay disgruntled. “Anderson was more realistic, said you were a pain in the ass but you knew how to get the job done and we’d all be a little weaker for your loss, though he may have said it more politely than that. He asked Alenko if he’d say something too, but I don’t think he had the words. Not for that crowd anyway. Now, I don’t know much about human mourning rituals but getting _ extremely _ drunk seems to be important, so as soon as we found a bar that could serve a dextro beer, I obliged. You know Kaidan starts to glow when he’s drunk a lot? At least I _ think _ that part was real, hard to tell in hindsight, there really was a _ lot _ of alcohol…” Garrus shook his head. “In any case: we talked, the way men who are very drunk and very sad do.” He carefully placed the frame back on Shepard’s desk with Kaidan’s shy smile pointed right at her, the sniper’s precise shot to the heart as unerring as ever. “He’s angry now, but I don’t think he could hate you even if he tried.”

Rani regarded the portrait for a moment, her eyes downcast, before speaking. “I know.”

“You do?” Garrus’s mandibles did the thing Shepard had always interpreted as turian eyebrow raising. “Damn, I was all prepared to talk you round. I had a speech ready and everything.”

Shepard shrugged. “I suppose I should have expected his reaction. If our roles were reversed it… would not have been so dignified. There’d be yelling and broken things. Probably no colony left at all.” She hugged her arms close to her chest. “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. I _ hoped _ he’d be glad to see me, that he’d understand and everything would go back to how it was but it’s… more complicated than that. And after you and Tali took it all in your stride, I guess I–” She stopped and shook her head, dismayed at the insane unlikelihood of her situation. No-one was equipped for the dead coming back to life, not the bereft nor the departed themselves. Kaidan had called her a ghost, and that didn’t seem far off. It should be a wonder that _ anyone _ was coping. 

“Oh, there was some processing to be done, believe me,” said Garrus. “But it had to wait until after the siege and the rocket to the face and the lifesaving surgery, after which Commander Shepard being not so dead didn’t seem like such a stretch.” He paused. “_ Also _ I’d had a message from Tali right before that all went down, the gist of which was ‘ _ What And How The Fuck’ _.”

Shepard huffed a half-hearted laugh. “Good question.” She flopped back against the illuminated glass of the fishtank and slid down until she sat on the floor. After a moment Garrus hunched down next to her.

“I guess he told you all about us then?” asked Rani, looking down at her hands as she absently picked at her fingernails. “Our illicit affair.” That sounded dramatic, but it was true enough. They’d both known how much trouble there’d be if they were found out, but that had seemed less and less important as time went on.

“Didn’t really need to, Shepard.” Garrus sounded apologetic, but also slightly amused.

“Oh.” She winced, not sure if she wanted the answer to her next question: “Did _ everyone _know?”

“Not everyone. But I think most of us realised there was a little more going on than you wanted us to see.”

She shook her head ruefully. “We thought we were so discreet.” 

“Oh, no, you were pretty good. No-one ever caught him sneaking out of your cabin or anything. But you couldn’t hide some things: The way you looked at each other, or stood a touch closer together than normal, the way he’d help you with your armour, or all those little wordless agreements. Anyone who spent much time with the two of you could tell how close you were. And you forget- I _ was _ a detective. May not have found anything solid on Saren but you two were a much easier case to crack.”

“I’m not sure that comforts me… Who knows, maybe there’s a court martial waiting for me if I ever get back to the Alliance. Though I suppose fraternizing with a fellow officer might be quite low on the list of my offenses. Did kind of mutiny and steal a ship even before I was a traitor.”

“You saved a colony from being totally wiped out. You’ve saved _ a lot _of people. As far as I can see you’re doing the same job you always did, how’s that make you a traitor?” 

“Oh, maybe because it’s Cerberus paying the bills? They’re the enemy, and here I am working for them. With them,” she quickly corrected herself. She grew quiet again. “Kaidan certainly thought it did.”

“He’ll come around. Right now he doesn’t have all the facts.”

“I’m not sure that I do either. I just wish we’d had more time to talk. Explain, in as much as I can.”

“Think you could have talked him into coming along?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know... Maybe it’s best that he’s not involved. They’d only find a way to use him to manipulate me. Again.” The last word was bitter in her mouth. Clearly her old crew weren’t the only ones to put two and two together. They’d known exactly how to invest her in Horizon. No, the further away Kaidan was the better it was for both of them. Not that all of her was on board with that conclusion. “I just wanted more time to talk. For him it's been years but for me it feels like only a few months. He's worked through it all and gotten over me, while I'm still- I’m still newly in love.” Her voice wavered and tears suddenly welled up, the carefully constructed floodgates of her composure finally bursting open with the admission. She buried her face in her arms. “It's so stupid.” Her shoulders shook and her words were muffled as they were forced out between sobs. “I’m a goddamned marine. N7. The first human Spectre. I won the Star of Terra when I was_ twenty-two _ . I’ve come back from the dead, faced geth and collectors and husks and reapers and rogue Spectres and- and I'm sitting here in my dressing gown crying over fucking _ Kaidan Alenko _.”

There was a thoughtful pause.

Turians could not, technically, smirk. They didn't have the mouths for it. You needed lips and different cheek muscles. But there was a way that they tilted their heads and did a thing with their mandibles that was close, and Garrus had a voice that was basically an aural smirk anyway. So when he spoke next Rani assumed that his words were delivered with a smirk.

“Isn't this about… _ not _ fucking Kaidan Alenko?”

Her mouth formed an indignant O as she looked up, red eyed, at Garrus and smacked him on the arm. It wasn't hard and he probably couldn’t feel it through the armour and carapace, but it certainly made _ her _ feel better. “I am heartbroken and in tears, Vakarian, and you're making shitty jokes!”

“Oh come on, Shepard, I couldn't leave that there. And now you're _ laughing _ and crying, that's an improvement, right?” Shepard knew a shit-eating-grin when she saw it no matter the shape of the face it was on.

“I saved your life and _ this _ is the treatment I get?” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, a small grudging smile fighting the urge to resume crying. “I can’t believe I let you back on my crew, you’re terrible.”

“True enough.”

“Of all the people I could have had back I had to get the smart-arse turian.”

“Humans tell me that beggars can’t be choosers. Also something about the use of projectiles in glass structures that I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly.” Garrus looked down at her very seriously. “I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but you’re kind of a smart-ass yourself.”

“You’re just trying to rile me up so I’m not miserable anymore.”

“Well, I know how to deal with you when you’re angry, I’m… I’m not sure what to do with sad,” he admitted. “I’m not very good at this.”

The fight went out of her in one breath. “Me either.” She wiped her nose again and pressed her lips together as the tears threatened to well up once more. “I miss everyone. Not just Kaidan- Wrex, Tali, Liara–” she paused and sniffed “–Ash. She’d have some things to say right now, I’m sure.”

Garrus chuckled. “_Spirits _, can you imagine? She’d be even more pissed with you than Kaidan was.”

“No doubt. Maybe if I’d had both of them glaring at me I’d have stayed right there and given Cerberus the finger.”

“I have no idea what that means but it sounds _ extremely _ intimate.”

Rani snorted. “I’m really glad you’re here Garrus.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Terrible as you are.”

“Hey, someone’s got to watch your back. And without the rest of the old crew around, I guess it had better be the smart-ass turian. Now, what _ does _ giving someone a finger mean?”

“With those talons, I think it’s best you don’t know.”


End file.
